You know, I want to hate Comcast as much as everyone else, but I am paying what I consider a fair price (it's a promotion, but a *2 year* discounted promotion) for a huge selection of HD TV channels, IP phone service, and consistent 30Mbps down/ 3Mbps up Internet access.

I do admit their customer support isn't always the most useful when something goes wrong, but they have always tried to help (and when they eventually did have to send a tech to fix the line, he was very competent). Gotta give credit to alm

I agree. Comcast is an evil corporation that I'm sure is out to destroy the happy future I hope to see... but they're the best ISP I've ever had and by golly they always just worked.

I wish I could get comcast at my new residence.

I doubly wish I could get some city owned Fiber but it's still only in the planning stages. But I would settle for an evil corporation who is probably going to use all of their clout to destroy emerging IP delivered TV services.

We'll see... I'm not totally Comcast-clueless (or a first time Comcast customer after having moved many times - now I'm just less mobile since I finally bought a house;). The increase (based on current rates at least) will be more like 50%, not 2-3x.

Anyway, we'll see if I keep the cable TV (the largest portion of the bill) once the deal is over. Don't really need a Roku, since I already have a PS3 and XBox that both do Netflix, Hulu, and video/music sharing from a local server...

Have you tried re-signing? I had the same thing happen with me at Cox (boy is that name appropriate) and like you it was pretty much a choice of that or dialup, as the DSL in this area is lucky to hit 756k down (and AT&T told me basically tough shit we're not spending on fixing the lines. must be nice to have a monopoly) so I told them I would have to cancel the account as the price jump was ridiculous.

Lucky for me the girl manning the desk was a little college girl whose PC I had worked on and she tol

Actually, according to Serious Tubes Network (the ISP in question), Comcast did _not_ help them:http://serioustubes.org/ [serioustubes.org]

Important news:

Comcast did not help us fix The Pirate Bay. The problem was GBLX using reverse path filtering. We shut down one of our transits because it was flapping. The result was that all outgoing traffic to GBLX got filtered even though the packets took the same path as before. The Pirate Bay is using different paths for incoming and outgoing traffic to avoid beeing traced. We don’t even know where their servers are. We resolved the issue by activating our other transit again.

Not necessarily - could be that they have some contingency plans in place to handle loss of service to popular sites, and those plans don't distinguish based on politics only on traffic (as it makes financial sense to help fix one website instead of having to field thousands of support calls), so the site goes down, the engineers follow the plan and restore it and some management bod sees an opportunity for some personal glory and jumps on it. Not saying that's the case, but your assumption, without knowing

The report didn’t go unnoticed by Comcast either. In a response to the issue Jason Livingood, Executive Director Internet Systems Engineering at Comcast, told TorrentFreak: “Please note that we do not block websites and we are NOT blocking The Pirate Bay.”

Looks like Comcast management saw the problem and addressed it even before Pirate Bay asked for help. Unless you don't consider Executive Director as management.

I don't entirely believe this given my experience working inside Data Service Providers. I've called over to various regional NOC/SOCs (both within the ISP that I worked at and others that I had contact phone numbers to) and when it comes to backbone issues (speed/throughput, hand-off and even routing issues), unless they're getting an alarm from somewhere, they generally don't know that there is a problem. And even then they don't always get the necessary alarms to tell them this is a problem in the firs

Your connection is probably doing what Rogers does here in Canada. They're actually adveretising it as such, too... when they see "extra" bandwidth available, you get a quick burst of speed before it drops down... the result is that when you do a speed test, poof, you get 25meg, but as soon as you try to download something that's more than a couple of megs, you lose the speed boost and get a more realistic measure of your line speed. Works great for watching Youtube/Vimeo, but sucks balls for anything large

When you establish a pattern of fucking with the network and lying about it, having the worst assumed about you when circumstances are shady comes with the territory. Did people reach the wrong conclusion? Yes, apparently. Were they wrong or was it irrational to do so? Not particularly.

Jumping to conclusions is pretty much the very fucking definition of irrational.

You're right, we should never infer a future or new behaviour from an existing verified pattern of behaviour - yeah that's just so irrational. Or perhaps you're suggesting that the application of network "management" policies is completely random? No I think in this instance, accuse first and apologise later is justified.

Slashdot users spend half of every day bitching about how Joe Average just isn't discerning enough. They don't support the politicians and policies that Slashdot Joe supports, therefore the conclusion is that they just accept whatever is spoon-fed to them. Slashdot Joe is immune to advertising because he's just too smart, but it's a multi-billion dollar industry so the explanation must be that Joe Average just can't resist the urge to buy any shit they see on TV. Joe Average and everybody like him are "sheeple," a term that, if not invented here, certainly crops up everyday. It goes on and on and on, every single day.

Sometimes things can't be verified, or at least can't be verified with an average person's resources. Sometimes, it's as simple as dropping to a fucking shell and typing "ping thepiratebay.org" with a non-Comcast ISP and realizing that people are being "sheeple." Which do you figure this was?

Not everybody attached to this story was wrong. From the sounds of it, there was a progression where at some point, non-Comcast users could still reach the site while Comcasters couldn't. But by the time the story hit Slashdot, it was already bullshit and not one person in the entire chain of posting this story, including paid "editors," bothered to see if it was true. Then the vast majority of Slashdotters, many of whom posted some idiocy about how superior they are yesterday and will do so again tomorrow, jumped right on the bandwagon, unable to be bothered to spend literally ten seconds of their own time to verify what they're being told. Then there's people like you, defending it. Gosh, it can't be that you were in the wrong, it's just that Comcast sucks soooooo much that assuming they're wrong without spending ten seconds to see is the logical thing to do! No, sorry. Own up to the failure. Own up to this site, at least today, being no better than the "sheeple" they deride. This is a technology website for god's sake. If we can't be bothered to take ten seconds to see if we know what we're talking about... well, we deserve being put in our place by situations like this, don't we?

Defending this is just juvenile. This wasn't Comcast's failure--neither the problems with TPB nor everybody else jumping to conclusions because ten seconds of their life to verify fact and fiction is just too much to ask. It was the failure of the people jumping to those conclusions, period, and like the OP said, they should shut up and eat their crow.

Uhhhhmmmm - I never did bash Comcast - but I'll admit that I thought they were probably being dicks when I read the story early this morning. Sorry, Comcast. I'll wait til you are bigger dicks before thinking bad things about you!

It's very interesting that took another source to show the previous summary was wrong (note also, that the previous summary indicated it was Comcast fault).

What seems worrisome is that not many people came out to say that there were problems on other networks too. Does that mean that people in the Comcast network tend to use TPB more? or does it simply mean that Comcast is so big now that everyone around you seems to have a subscription with them. Where were all the Verizon people indicating they had or

Engineers are not business managers. Engineers aren't the ones that decided to go with the 250GB cap, they aren't the one answering subpoenas by the MPAA. I'm not holding my breath if one of these guys gets fired or the engineering manager that green lit this project gets 'reassigned'.

Most engineers that I know are tinkerers and love to solve problems whether it is mechanical, electrical or software. I'm sure they saw it as a challenge.

No, it just means that they are afraid to draw attention to the fact that they are evil, you know, when their merger with NBC is being scrutinized. Best if they look like they really care about keeping the network neutral and just carrying bits, so that nobody thinks of asking what might happen when NBC's competitors try to stream their video over Comcast's little corner of the Internet.

Sorry, but when it comes to large and powerful corporations, I have a lot of trouble trusting them to help people who actually harm their bottom line. Comcast has throttled BitTorrent in the past, they own TV stations whose shows can be found via TPB, and they are busy trying to make sure that the government does not pass any regulations that would impede their ability to throttle or filter traffic. Now suddenly a technical problem strikes TPB, and people immediately ask if Comcast is doing this deliberately; Comcast can ignore the problem and let "Serious Tubes Networks" deal with it, or they can help out and gain some positive PR.

Gee, why would I think that Comcast was not just trying to get some good PR here?

Wait, Red Hat is evil now, too? I know we rejected Novell, but I must have missed that memo.

Try reading a RH story sometime, the Ubuntulovers bash RH mercilessly. And when they're not being active on the flaming front, all the Slackware guys who had one bad experience with gcc2.96 back in 2000 will chime in and tell you how clueless RH is. It's disgraceful.

Between Netflix, VOIP, and tons of commercials, Cable TV has been taking a hit in the downturn in the economy. They need to keep their Internet subscribers. This is more important to keep their triple play customers. Between FIOS and other competition, their market is seriously eroding.

Comcast probably had 500+ calls in queue and were getting hammered on the issue by their customers. I am sure there was supervisor or manager in support that was driving them(Pirate Bay) to get this fixed and get the calls out of their queues.

Yeah, because when a single web site isn't working the first thing I do is call my ISP and ask them to go fix it.

You're posting on slashdot self-selection.
Remember...
If 1% out of 10 million customers decide to call in, that's
100,000 people.

Look, there are always some crazies that call in when $random_website is down.
You'd probably be surprised at the massive volume of calls an ISP gets from farmville players if Facebook has a 60 minute outage.

Because I've never seen Comcast go out of there way to help out a website before? Do you expect them to hand out free tech support for every website that has problems? THAT is why I'm surprised by this.

Although, really, it is rare to see a company, especially (like) Comcast, actually doing something good for users. Going out of their way to fix the connection to the Pirate Bay - that's a pretty ballsy move, and they should get some credit for it.

Comcast did not help us fix The Pirate Bay. The problem was GBLX using reverse path filtering. We shut down one of our transits because it was flapping. The result was that all outgoing traffic to GBLX got filtered even though the packets took the same path as before. The Pirate Bay is using different paths for incoming and outgoing traffic to avoid beeing traced. We donâ(TM)t even know where their servers are. We resolved the issue by activatin

Having TPB "down" seriously impacts the business model of the folks suing alleged p2p down-loaders. There for, it was ESSENTIAL that they have one of their proxies "help" TPB straighten out their issue. A lot of lawyers livelihood depends on TPB connectivity.

more like undermines comcast's business model, if you can't download phat warez why would you need a 5, 7, 10, or 15 megabit pipe? i have cheap ass-dsl 1.5megabit and i pay 30 bucks for it, i just play games and web browse online, no torrents so i don't need cable internet.

Comcast has nothing to gain by blocking The Pirate Bay, and plenty to gain by helping address the filtering problem.
By addressing, and helping to fix, the problem, Comcast has gained a little positive karma in the online community. By blocking The Pirate Bay, they'd only be buying more bad PR, while not actually doing anything to address the problem of torrent bandwidth usage. After all, block one torrent site, and users will just use another site.

If you are going to bash a company when it does something bad, you should also applaud it for doing something good. Kudos to you Comcast. That being said, your internet still sucks, but it's the cheapest in my area;)

Except they have stooped to that level in the recent past and after months of denying it, finally admitted it and were called to task for it by the FCC. That is precisely the reason why everyone jumped to the worst conclusion when everyone with Comcast was having trouble reaching TPB and everyone with another provider was (for the first many hours of the incident) not having a problem.

If you're known as the neighborhood trouble-maker, it's your own damn fault if everyone looks accusingly at you the next tim

That's terrific! When MY Comcast internet is down, it takes me two days on the phone just to get them to admit that there's a problem. Even when I tell them what the problem is and how to fix it, I STILL can't get them to fix it.

My friend had issues with Comcast. Internet would randomly lag, sometimes cut out. After 2 months of it, he complained right up the tree, as high as he could go. He finally got a tech to come out, the fixed it, they upgraded his package to 60mb, gave him HBO, and all of that for 6 months free. He didn't pay a dime for those 6 months and never had a connection problem again...outside of overall network problems.

Not as good but similar story for me with Charter Comm. My wife and I rarely watch TV, just a few

To their credit, they don't listen to what random customers tell them to do over a support line. Even if they did listen to you and it ended up fixing the network, that'd be a dangerous precedent to set. This isn't a personal attack against you btw, sorry if it came across like that.

I can appreciate that they don't know me from Adam and I don't expect them to take my advice about how to fix the problem, but when I tell them my cable is out, I don't want to hear "No, it isn't."

Have you ever called them? While you're correct that they can't just start making changes because the customer said so, if they understood how a network or the internet works they could understand what he's saying and start going through the proper channels to have things looked into. I've done my time in phone support roles, both public facing and internal, for multiple companies and that was true at all of them. When you call these guys it's pretty clear that they don't know how any of this stuff works

Not really, Comcast only pays a couple dollars an hour less than other tech support setups in the area where the workers really do know their shit. They would need to actually provide training (the horror), but that isn't that expensive if you can be arsed to treat your employees like human beings so they don't jump ship for a job that pays less just so they can go to the bathroom without risking losing their job, and can at least rely on having their paycheck show up on time.

A nice, well-deserved boot in the face to everyone who prejudged, and who therefore should never be allowed onto a jury.

I take it you've never got home from work one day and found port 80 http redirecting to a sad face and a message to call your ISP to get told off about stealing a movie from a company you've never heard of in a country you don't care about?

You know what I said to them? Fuck you, prove it, and turn my internet on or I'm calling up your competitors.

I guarantee you that, just like in television and telephony, *once you get to the actual engineers*, they're really nice, sane, helpful people, who want to give you what you want to get, and are paying good money for (as long as you, yourself, are sane -- this is why there's 3 tiers of triage before you get to one).

But their job is not to worry about content, it's to worry about transport.

I'm sick and tired of Slashdot editors blindly reposting everything that comes down the firehose without stopping to check whether articles are dupes, PR volleys, or just plain wrong.

Look at it this way. Anyone in the chain of publication of the original story [slashdot.org], from the orginal commenter on Engadget to Engadget's editors to the anonymous coward who submitted to Slashdot to the Slashdot editor who approved it, could have done what I did: "ping thepiratebay.org" from work, and find it was down outside of Comcastland too. Then they would have had a *real* headline: "Comcast falsely accused of jamming ThePirateBay."

I hear that investigative journalism is too expensive for major news outlets to handle these days, so it's up to bloggers and websites to do the journalism. But when nobody can be bothered to type a 1-line bash command, what's left of the Fourth Estate is in deep shit.

TPB was not down outside of Comcast land, initially. For several hours when the initial reports were being published online, nobody could reach TPB from Comcast, but they could useing a proxy or VPN and those on other networks could reach it. It wasn't until hours later that the same behavior started to appear on other networks. In light of those circumstances and prior Comcast behavior, it's not entirely irrational that people started to question if they were intentionally blocking them.

So, no, what would have happened in your example is that someone with Comcast would have tried to reach TPB and failed. Then they'd ping it and fail. Then they'd login via another network and ping it and it would work.

Dammit! We finally have figured out who is good and who is evil in the whole filtering spiel and then Comcast does something like that! Make up your friggin' mind, do you want to be good or evil! You're confusing the hell out of us poor geeks!

(See? You can come up with some dirt to throw at Comcast even with this material, you just gotta look harder)

Otherwise they would lose protection as the common carrier and become responsible for all the content on their network. Syrian government is much more evil than the Pirate Bay, but you are still allowed to call them on the phone or look up their website on Google.

The problem was GBLX using reverse path filtering. We shut down one of our transits because it was flapping. The result was that all outgoing traffic to GBLX got filtered even though the packets took the same path as before. The Pirate Bay is using different paths for incoming and outgoing traffic to avoid beeing traced. We don’t even know where their servers are.